View Full Version : Evil In The World
There is evil in the world. Throughout history we've have seen some acts of inhumanity that only can be described by one word: Evil. Who do you consider to be the "Top Ten" evil people of all time? And why? If you can only think of five... okay. But you know more. Trust me.
This is a topic that will require a lot of time to answer. So I will add my list two at a time that way we can have time to debate my choices as no doubt I will have names others will not agree with.
Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan was the man there is no one to come close to him He ruled most of the known world. He is reputed to have once sent six Chinese ambassadors home after shaving their beards and filling their ears with hot lead. On another occasion he lay siege to a city for a year and on their surrender he killed every man woman child budgerigar and gold fish in the place. When nothing was left alive he had the city dismantled stone by stone and scattered into the desert. That is a tactic that required a special kind of evil and was in fact used by the Germans in France during WW2
Jorge Rafael Videla
Jorge Rafael Videla was born the 2 of August of 1925 He was President of Argentina between 1976 and 1981 . His government was responsible for countless abuses to the human resources during the call "dirty war", that began like a project to finish with the terrorism, but also finished with the death of thousands of civilians.
After leading the military coup that overthrew to Isabel Perón the 24 of March of 1976 , Videla became President of Argentina being the head of a government of three men who received the name of Military junta, conforming it next to General Ramon Agosti and the Admirante Eduardo Emilio Massera.
Videla suspended the Congress and left the legislative powers in a commission of nine men; it stopped the political activities of oposition parties and union of workers; and it filled the government with military personnel. Hundreds and thousands of people "disappeared" in the later years, apparently assassinated.
This policy of kidnap torture and disappearances then led to another problem STREET CHILDREN. For this videla also had the answer he simply sent the police out with a shoot on sight directive. Jorge Rafael Videla a great man a warm and wonderful human being.
So what do you think guys are these two wothy of making the top ten?
Remember, he's not done yet. And I don't think they're in any order. He's just gathering some background from the web so you know why he chose them.
What about you? You don't have to go into great details, but who do you think would be on the list? It's okay if you do what aussie's doing. I love to learn about history. So a little at a time is okay too!!!
The dude who decided to run those Valtrex commercials that run during Temptation Island?
Shit ... guess you had to be there
Here are the first of my 10 most evil:
1. "Tomas de Torquemada - Born in Spain in 1420, his name is synonymous with the Christian Inquisition's horror, religious bigotry, and cruel fanaticism. He was a fan of various forms of torture including foot roasting, use of the garrucha, and suffocation. He was made Grand Inquisitor by Pope Sixtus IV. Popes and kings alike praised his tireless efforts. The number of burnings at the stake during Torquemada's tenure has been estimated at about 2,000. Torquemada's hatred of Jews influenced Ferdinand and Isabella to expel all Jews who had not embraced Christianity."
2. "Vlad Tepes - Vlad the Impaler was a prince known for executing his enemies by impalement. He was a fan of various forms of torture including disemboweling and rectal and facial impalement. Vlad the Impaler tortured thousands while he ate and drunk among the corpses. He impaled every person in the city of Amlas -- 20,000 men, women and children. Vlad often ordered people to be skinned, boiled, decapitated, blinded, strangled, hanged, burned, roasted, hacked, nailed, buried alive, stabbed, etc. He also liked to cut off noses, ears, sexual organs and limbs. But his favorite method was impalement on stakes, hence the surname "Tepes" which means "The Impaler" in the Romanian language. It is this technique he used in 1457, 1459 and 1460 against Transylvanian merchants who had ignored his trade laws. He also looked upon the poor, vagrants and beggars as thieves. Consequently, he invited all the poor and sick of Wallachia to his princely court in Tirgoviste for a great feast. After the guests ate and drank, Dracula ordered the hall boarded up and set on fire. No one survived."
ozblonde
03-05-02, 01:52PM
This is a guy Aussie told me about and after a little reading I think he must deserve billing at or near the top of any list such as this. When people spoke of evil in the past I always automaticly thought of the devil of Hitler. No longer I now know of Joseph Stalin a real monster
In the 1990s, Soviet archives and KGB files were opened, revealing a wealth of new material on Stalin's rule of terror. We now know that somewhere between 30 and 70 million Soviet citizens died as a result of Stalin's orders.
Stalin's rule and merciless annihilation of his own people. His victims in Soviet Union alone are estimated in tens of millions. The number of Soviet citizens murdered directly by the order of Stalin far exceeds the twenty million soviets who lost their lives the second world war Stalin's first foray into mass murder took place in 1929 following the exile of Leon Trotsky.
Official figures show that twenty million Soviet citizens died while fighting the occupying German Army during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. However, many more million died directly as a result of Stalin's orders. During the war, Stalin orchestrated a large-scale relocation to Siberia and Kazakhstan, of a range of ethnic groups including Tatars, Chechens, Kalmiks. After Great Patriotic War, (May 1945), all remaining Soviet POWs were sent to concentration camps, while those accused of collaborating with Germans were shot on the spot.
One of the better-known examples of Stalin's genocidal policies against his own people was what came to be known as 'Stalin's Purges'. These involved the relentless and methodical killing of Party members, the educated, and the army between 1935 and 1939. During the same period millions of Soviet citizens were imprisoned in Gulags, exiled, or murdered.
Trotsky was Stalin's major rival after the death of Lenin, He was expelled from the Communist Party in 1927, and subsequently exiled. Trotsky's supporters were rounded up and imprisoned or just shot. Trotsky himself deid years later in exile in Mexico, from a blow with an ice axe dealt by an emissary of Stalin.
In 1932-1933, Stalin orchestrated a Great Famine in Ukraine. He blocked foreign aid trying to reach Ukraine's starving peasants, and let tonnes of wheat rot in storage areas while the Ukrainian population was reduced by almost a quarter, from 40 to 30 million. At the height of the Famine, Ukrainian villagers were dying at the rate of 25,000 per day or 1,000 per hour or 17 per minute. It is estimated that no fewer than three million children born between 1932-1933 in Ukraine died of hunger.
Stalin's purges culminated in 1937, when a number of show trails of leading Party officials such as Zinoviev and Kamenev were organized and carried out by Vishinsky, the Soviet Union's Chief Prosecutor. Vishinsky established his own unique method of prosecution, the so-called doctrine of the presumption of guilt. This meant that those put on trial were considered guilty until conclusively proven innocent. By the end of 1939, Stalin rid himself of any potential opponent within Party ranks and the general public.
Between the end of the war, and his death in 1953, Stalin engineered a new wave of repressions, focusing, in particular, on Soviet Jews. Before his death intervened, Stalin planned to stage public executions in Red Square, of Jewish doctors and officials found guilty of crimes against the Soviet State.
Well done OZ great post. Im glad you took the time to read a little and discover that evil does at times go beyond Adolf Hitler. Hitler put six million Jews Gypsies and Slavs through hell and beyond and that puts him right up there with the worst. His biggest problem is that he lost the war so his atrocities were well publicised. Stalin on the other hand lost no war so no one was tried for his crimes against humanity and consequently no one knew of the absolute bastardry he was inflicting on his people. Of corse it goes with out saying he left few to no witnesses behind either. While Hitler was and is widely condemned for genocide of the Slavs, Gypsies and the Jews few people realise that Stalin put five to fourteen times that number to the sword. The act of denying humanitarian aid to the Ukrainian people during famine is alone enough to place him in most peoples top ten
However as with all ledgers there is a plus side to Stalins as well. He quite capably led his people to victory against the Germans during the second world war. It also must be said that he took control of what was basically a third world country (Russia was the poor man of Europe) and dragged them by the hair kicking and screaming into the 20th century. The cost however was horrendous millions died for the advancement of the soviet empire.
Just be glad we live in different times and in a better place. You could perhaps thank what ever god you pray to as well that you were delivered from that particular hell.
http://www.bluemeanie.tsn.cc/gif/people/ppl020.gif
ozblonde
03-06-02, 12:53PM
Its quite sad really that every one knows of hitler and the things he did and a piece of garbage like stalin escapes relativly un-noticed. I think I read either the third or fourth article on him before the sheer magnitude of the whole thing dawned on me. So many lives lost so many futures unfulfilled. How do we allow monsters like this to flourish. Stalin didnt just live he thrived the more he murdered the stronger he got. :rant:
You can learn so much on the web. When I first came on I has armed with the information formed from public school. Basically, if it didn't touch American soil, it was a footnote at best.
Amuarote introduced me to Kerensky and Stalin on a more popular view. And now you and aussie have introduced me to another side of Stalin. Stalin may have dragged his Country into the 20th Century... But he is living proof that what is good for the country isn't always good for the people.
ozblonde
03-08-02, 03:17PM
It is wonderful the things we can learn from each other. I love it
Another on my list of most evil people:
Genghis Khan - The Mongol Temjin, known to history as Genghis Khan (born 1162) was a warrior and ruler who, starting from obscure and insignificant beginnings, brought all the nomadic tribes of Mongolia under the rule of himself and his family in a rigidly disciplined military state. Massacres of defeated populations, with the resultant terror, were weapons he regularly used. His Mongol hordes killed off countless people in Asia and Europe in the early 1200s. When attacking Volohoi Kahn convinced the city commander that Mongols would stop attacking if the city sent out 1,000 cats and several thousand swallows. When he got them, Genghis had bits of cloth tied to their tails and set the cloth on fire. The cats and birds fled back to the city and ended up setting hundreds of fires inside the city. Then Genghis attacked and won. At another time, Mongols rounded up 70,000 men, women, and children and shot them with arrows. Genghis told his comrades: "Man's greatest good fortune is to chase and defeat his enemy, seize his total possessions, leave his married women weeping and wailing, ride his gelding, use his women as a nightshirt and support, gazing upon and kissing their rosy breasts, sucking their lips which are as sweet as the berries of their breasts."
When I read that last quote my skin crawled. He is another barbarian to join the ranks of most evil for sure.
Evil can be around any neighbourhood corner, anywhere in the world. It doesn't have to be embodied in war leaders or dictators. Remember the Ruanda genocide, the ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia etc.
I seriously doubt Adolf hitler will ever be even in the top ten of a list of the most evil people in history. He may well be the best known but dosnt even come close to some of the people who worked for him. Guys like Josef Mengele, the infamous doctor of Auschwitz, commonly referred to as the "Angel of Death". who was quite at home conducting medical experiments on captive Jews,Gypsies,Russians, or slavs.
Or perhaps Rudolf Hoess who`s own testimony I will post here now. Hitler gave the orders but people like these willingly carried them out and took great pride in their work these are the truly evil.
Rudolf Hoess born in 1900, , joined the SS in 1933, and eventually commanded the massive extermination center of Auschwitz, whose name has come to symbolize humanity's ultimate descent into evil. This is his signed testimony at the Post-War trials of Major War Criminals held at Nuremburg.
1, RUDOLF FRANZ FERDINAND HOESS, being first duly sworn, depose and say as follows:
1. I am forty*six years old, and have been a member of the NSDAPI since 1922; a member of the SS since 1934; a member of the Waffen*SS since 1939. I was a member from 1 December 1934 of the SS Guard Unit, the so*called Deathshead Formation (Totenkopf Verband).
2. I have been constantly associated with the administration of concentration camps since 1934, serving at Dachau until 1938; then as Adjutant in Sachsenhausen from 1938 to 1 May, 1940, when I was appointed Commandant of Auschwitz. l commanded Auschwitz until 1 December,1943, and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about 3,000,000. This figure represents about 70% or 80% of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labor in the concentration camp industries. Included among the executed and burnt were approximately 20,000 Russian prisoners of war (previously screened out of Prisoner of War cages by the Gestapo) who were delivered at Auschwitz in Wehrmacht transports operated by regular Wehrmacht officers and men. The remainder of the total number of victims included about 100,000 German Jews, and great numbers of citizens (mostly Jewish) from Holland, France, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece, or other countries. We executed about 400,000 Hungarian Jews alone at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944.
4. Mass executions by gassing commenced during the summer 1941 and continued until fall 1944.1 personally supervised executions at Auschwitz until the first of December 1943 and know by reason of my continued duties in the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps WVHA2 that these mass executions continued as stated above. All mass executions by gassing took place under the direct order, supervision and responsibility of RSHA.31 received all orders for carrying out these mass executions directly from RSHA.
6. The "final solution" of the Jewish question meant the complete extermination of all Jews in Europe. l was ordered to establish extermination facilities at Auschwitz in June 1941. At that time there were already in the general govemment three other extermination camps; BELZEK, TREBLINKA and WOLZEK. These camps were under the Einsatzkommando of the Security Police and SD. I visited Treblinka to find out how they carried out their exterminations. The Camp Commandant at Treblinka told me that he had liquidated 80,000 in the course of one*half year. He was principally concerned with liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. He used monoxide gas and I did not think that his methods were very efficient. So when I set up the extermination building at Auschwitz, l used Cyclon B, which was a crystallized Prussic Acid which we dropped into the death chamber from a small opening. It took from 3 to 15 minutes to kill the people in the death chamber depending upon climatic conditions. We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped. We usually waited about one*half hour before we opened the doors and removed the bodies. After the bodies were removed our special commandos took off the rings and extracted the gold from the teeth of the corpses.
7. Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that we built our gas chambers to accommodate 2,000 people at one time, whereas at Treblinka their 10 gas chambers only accommodated 200 people each. The way we selected our victims was as follows: we had two SS doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. The prisoners would be marched by one of the doctors who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit for work were sent into the Camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work. Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated and at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties due to that fact. Very frequently women would hide their children under the clothes but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated. We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz .
8. We received from time to time special prisoners from the local Gestapo office. The SS doctors killed such prisoners by injections of benzine. Doctors had orders to write ordinary death certificates and could put down any reason at all for the cause of death.
9. From time to time we conducted medical experiments on women inmates, including sterilization and experiments relating to cancer. Most of the people who died under these experiments had been already condemned to death by the Gestapo.
10. Rudolf Mildner was the chief of the Gestapo at Kattowicz and as such was head of the political department at Auschwitz which conducted third degree methods of interrogation from approximately March 1941 until September 1943. As such, he frequently sent prisoners to Auschwitz for incarceration or execution. He visited Auschwitz on several occasions. The Gestapo Court, the SS Standgericht, which tried persons accused of various crimes, such as escaping Prisoners of War, etc., frequently met within Auschwitz, and Mildner often attended the trial of such persons, who usually were executed in Auschwitz following their sentence. l showed Mildner throughout the extermination plant at Auschwitz and he was directly interested in it since he had to send the Jews from his territory for execution at Auschwitz.
I understand English as it is written above. The above statements are true; this declaration is made by me voluntarily and without compulsion; after reading over the statement, I have signed and executed the same at Nurnberg, Germany on the fifth day of April 1946.
Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess, "Affidavit, 5 April 1946," in Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1945*1 October 1946 (Nuremberg: Secretariat of the International Military Tribunal, 1949), Doc. 3868*PS, vol. 33, 275*79.
Aussie,
I have to disagree with you again on this. Although all of the top nazi's were willingly and knowlingly involved in all these horrendous butchering schemes, it's Hitler himself who was the enabler for all of them. He was the political responsable in the early years when he became 'Reichskanselar' and he was the one who laid out the foundation of their 'politics'. I guess it depends on how you look upon it. Is the executioner more evil than the planner?
Have you ever read 'Mein Kampf' by Adolf Hitler?
Im in no way playing down hitlers role in anything that happened during the second world war. adolf Hitler was no nice guy and anyone who sugests he was is a fool. However! the thread is MOST Evil. Hitler for the most part was a politition, he was evil he was nasty, but unlike Stalin or Idi Amin or Pol Pot he took no personal part in the murder and left the final solution to those who were truly evil. Guys like Hoess and Mengele were in my view far more evil than hitler ever could be. They were men who enjoyed their work they took pride in their achievements and openly boasted of them. Do you know Hoess was known to don a gas mask on occassions and enter the gas chambers to watch the procedings up close? he once boasted of the efficency of the gas in that "they just vented a small cough and expired" THAT was evil.
Mengele and his medical experiments on child twins is even worse. Have you read of any of his experiments? Please read the following and then try to explain to me how Hitler was more of a feind than a man who could cut children to pieces without anesthetic all in the name of some misguided science?
Josef Mengele, aka Auschwitz's "Angel of Death," held a fascination with twins. As Auschwitz's senior "physician" he conducted "genetic experiments" on nearly 1500 sets of twins between 1943 and 1944. For this purpose, it was imperative to the weed out of twin sets from the lines of prisoners coming off the cattle cars. With the blessing and support of his senior and mentor Otmar Von Verscher at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, Mengele tested various genetic theories with the aim of illuminating Hitler's racial dogmas. Twins were particularly useful because a set of twins share an identical gene pool and their reactions to mutual treatments could be monitered with this in mind. Mengele also picked out individuals with any other physical abnormalities: midgits, dwarfs, hunchbacks. Because 10,000 prisoners might pass through this death camp in a given day, numerous pairs of twins could be found and plucked out as subjects for his "research."
Twins were kept in separate barracks from the other prisoners, and sometimes given preferential treatment. They were better fed than other prisoners, and monitered by gaurds who might be blamed if any of the twins fell ill or died. Unfortunately, this preferential treatment was short-term. Of the 3000 twins who passed through Mengele's labs, only 200 survived the war. Depending on the type of experiment endured by the twins, they were driven to various labs at Auschwitz or neighboring Birkenau camp. Most received routine blood and x-ray tests, often on a daily basis. Mengele's assistants in his experiments were often Jewish inmates with medical backgrounds who had been spared the gas chambers because of their skills.
Twins undergoing his experiments didn't know what the objectives were. It is known that he had a special pathology lab where he performed autopsies on twins who had died from experiements. It was located next to the cremetorium. Mengele's experiments both physical and psychological; experimental surgeries performed without anesthesia, transfusions of blood from one twin to another, isolation endurance, reaction to various stimuli, injections with lethal germs, sex change operations, the removal of organs and limbs, incestuous impregnations. One twin recalls the death of his brother:
Dr. Mengele had always been more interested in Tibi. I am not sure why--perhaps because he was the older twin. Mengele made several operations on Tibi. One surgery on his spine left my brother paralyzed. He could not walk anymore. Then they took out his sexual organs. After the fourth operation, I did not see Tibi anymore. I cannot tell you how I felt. It is impossible to put into words how I felt. They had taken away my father, my mother, my two older brothers--and now, my twin.
:)
yikes, don't get me started on WW II. One of my pet subjects :)
I think we agree to differ on this one. People like Mengele, Hess, Himmler etc were the incredibly cruel bastards but I stick to the point that Hitler was the one that gave them the chance to do it. If you read 'Mein Kampf' you will see that he planned the Jew mass eradication years before the Nazi's even got to power.
The evil that Hitler stands for is not directly that of killing and mutulating people but that of mass manupulation of delusion. I would agree with you there. But it still gives me the creeps every time I watch video footage of his public speeches. Power abused to be evil to the extreme...
Amaurote
03-29-02, 12:54PM
Excellent posts; very thought-provoking indeed.
I'd probably begin by cavilling a little at the definition of "evil" - are we talking about a theological sense of evil ("Adolf Hitler was personally evil"), or an empirical one ("Adolf Hitler ordered and organized the Final Solution, which led to the deaths of six million innocent men, women and children)?
For example, I'd immediately echo Ozblonde and Diva's choice of Stalin, because he always seemed to me to epitomize the Totalitarian despot in a way that Hitler never did - Stalin was personally vindictive and paranoid, and the horrors of both the Gulag System and his purges are well known; his ruthless reputation was frequently bolstered by his fellow-travelling friends and erstwhile war allies in the West - "Uncle Joe" was Roosevelt's invention, don't forget - while his presidency horribly corrupted, enervated and prostrated the Russian people for years, producing a generation of apparatchiks (Yezhov, Beria, Kalinin, Molotov) as infamous for their servility as for their cruelty. He was also planning a mass deportation of Jews to Siberia in 1952-3, but his early death forestalled it - Radzinsky claims that he was secretly attempting to provoke the West into World War III, which the Soviet Union was at that time more capable of winning.
On the other hand, I probably wouldn't cite Lenin: I personally loathe his ideology, and the effects of his pseudo-revolution (i.e. coup) but I recognize the logic of his position, and his relative lack of natural cruelty. Stalin was a fairly consistent Marxist, but he utterly outstripped Lenin and Trotsky in his native Georgian love of violence and brutality. Then again, why argue? Without Lenin, Stalin would have remained Koba, and Koba could never have flourished under a fully-established Constitutional Duma. Leinin paved the way for Stalin's totalitarian nightmare, both logistically and ideologically. The mass liquididations and reigns of terror didn't start in 1924 - they were a routine feature from the first moment the Bolsheviks seized power from the hands of Alexander Kerensky.
Vice is as fundamentally nebulous as virtue, and it doesn't always bear fruits: in that context, you'd have to say that we're simply choosing from the most visible nominees, on the basis of casualty lists, which begs the question: do you measure the extent of evil from physical evidence, like body counts, or from the subtle metaphysical effect of a corrupting "wicked king" on his people?
Hi, Am.... Good to see you. I didn't want to define evil for the simple reason that we all have different views on what is considered "Evil". You described the different viewpoints very well. What I find most interesting is what people view as evil. When you hear the word "Evil" what comes to your mind first?
Amaurote
03-29-02, 03:49PM
Nice to see you again, Diva; I hope you're well - I know you're well.
Speaking purely subjectively, I don't judge evil from a purely empirical point of view - I judge it from its character. Stalin, for example, was certainly vindictive and quasi-paranoical, and the harm he wrought on the people of the Soviet Union is a matter of historical record...and yet, I have to say, his crimes were essentially a consequence of his genuinely logical - and sincere - adherence to an extreme ideology which others had held before him, wedded to a good deal of personal insecurity. There have been more evil men than Stalin on the face of the planet - they just happen to have killed fewer people.
For me, evil - vice - is the degradation and barbarization of the human spirit, the abuse of power; corruption; cruelty; the absence of compassion and empathy; contamination by the spirit of the world; dehumanization; alienation from one's fellow members of the human race; sadism. Stalin certainly had some of these traits, but he was ruled by idealism, and I respect that - even it does happen to be an idealism I personally detest. Hitler, on the other hand, was clearly a much narrower, more banal personality than Stalin - and banality, as Hannah Arendt famously said, is one of the key components of evil.
Of course, in these terms, I should probably cite Nero as one of the worst rulers ever to live, because he had no redeeming features of fanatical idealism, or indeed anything else. Then again, he was actually popular with the plebeians - the hierarchs deposed him, not the people. You can get away with almost any act of evil if you provide bread and circuses...
Sterling
03-29-02, 04:09PM
Stalin, for example, was certainly vindictive and quasi-paranoical, and the harm he wrought on the people of the Soviet Union is a matter of historical record...and yet, I have to say, his crimes were essentially a consequence of his genuinely logical - and sincere - adherence to an extreme ideology which others had held before him, wedded to a good deal of personal insecurity.
I don't think it was really a consequence of the ideology at all. The ideology of Marxism/Leninism never entailed oppression of the people, or ruthless dictatorship (true, there is a "dictatorship of the proletariat" stage in the plan for Communist revolution, but it is ended to be transient, not an end-goal).
Stalin was about personal power. That's why he had Trotsky bumped off with an ice pick. It's why Lenin warned the politburo against him before his death. It's how communist leaders came to have the title Secretary General - originally a Secretary General was just what it said, a secretary, but Stalin (who was the Secretary General) figured out that the person who timetabled and minuted meetings could manipulate events, desicion making processes, and history to an enourmous degree.
To be honest, when assessing evil, I think it's a somewhat moot point to argue whether Hitler or Stalin was worse. I can't find much good to say about either of them (except that both saved their counties economies, which were in ruinous states before they took power). Actually, that brings up another famously unpleasant dictator, Chairman Mao, who again oppressed his own population on a massive scale, but on the other hand achieved the feat of feeding everyone in China which had eluded many previous leaders.
Nero may have been popular, but that's not a saving grace. Hitler was very popular too. Check out newspaper reporting at the time - not just in Germany, but around the world, many 'mainstream' people admired him for his strong leadership. It's the fact that these evil people were able to achieve popularity that made them so dangerous. Had Hitler been less charismatic, he'd have been a minor league agitator that history would have forgotten about.
Amaurote
03-30-02, 01:41AM
Eloquently argued, Sterling, but I'd have to disagree.
To begin with, no-one who reads Lenin's State and Revolution can have any doubts about the fundamentally oppressive nature of Communism - even if you support its ultimate aims. It not only condemns parliamentarianism - in fact, it's probably the most anti-parliamentarian book I've ever read, with the possible exception of Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence - but democracy itself, which it viciously condemns as yet another form of the hated state which Lenin has sworn to destroy. What takes the place of the state, then? Well, bands of armed workers - not just in the transient socialist phase, with its "bourgeois spirit", but in the complete, communist phase, where Lenin envisages that minor acts of vice and anti-social behaviour will be punished locally, by those present at the time - whoever they may be. If this isn't reducing criminal statutes to the law of the jungle, what is?
Moreover, Lenin was always well aware that the peasants - the hated lumpenproletariat - completely outnumbered the proletariat in Russia: he hated and detested them, and modified the Socialist-Revolutionary land reforms to help deceive the people of the steppes and plains. When you say "people", who do you mean? The people in Russia in October 1917 were of all kinds, and of every description - but the vast majority were the peasants, loyal to the SRs, not the Bolsheviks.
As for your point about Stalin, I'd agree that he was obsessed with maintaining and extending his power - but to deny his Marxist orthodoxy is to deny the obvious evidence to the contrary: he may not have written anything original, but his library still exists, and it's filled to the brim with comprehensively annotated Marxist books - including Trotsky's, which he clearly admired greatly, notwithstanding their personal rivalry.
Indeed, Lenin may have warned the Politburo about him, but who appointed Stalin Gensek in the first place? Who failed to remove him? The reality is that Lenin relied heavily on Stalin, and admired his brutal cruelty - the "Final Legacy" condemns all the other Bolshevik leaders, and Trotsky and the others happily acceded to Stalin's desire to expunge it from the Communist record. There's an historical and political continuity between Trotsky and Stalin that can't be gainsaid - Trotsky may not have been as personally cruel, but his had millions shot for the sake of his undemocratic revolution, just the same. I can quite understand why people like yourself admire Trotsky - he was a great orator, and a wonderful writer - but I can't see the wrecker of the Provisonal Government and the genocidal killer of millions as a victim, no matter what his adherents say.
Mao - yeah. I originally disliked him, but he emerges from Philip Short's biography pretty well. In fact, it completely changed my opinion of Chang Kai-chek - the Chinese never had a democracy in the first place, so the rise of Communist rule wasn't a bad thing under the circumstances: it only became hateful later on, when Deng Xiao-Ping's early economic reforms were forestalled, during the Cultural Revolution.
Nero - point taken, but there's no real comparison between Nero and Hitler: Hitler was a totalizing dictator, whereas Nero was a classical dictator, content to leave his people in a Beggar's Democracy, without bothering them or changing their lives in any way. He may have been personally wicked, but his rule was technically more attractive to the people because they had no less democracy, and rather more entertainment - the senatorial class hated him, but they hated the plebeians even more than Nero did. In that context, you have to acknowledge his vice and incompetence, but remember the fundamentally wicked class hegemony of the Roman elite.
Vice has many masks, and sometimes whole classes wear them.
I think the semantics of 'evil' is important here. In my opinion the empirical evil as defined by Amaurote is the one that causes the biggest damage in the long run.
And coming back to one of Amaurote comments about 'visibility': here are two names that might not spring to mind of most people:
Jean-Bedel Bokassa: self-proclaimed emporer of Central African Republic
http://www.rice.edu/projects/thresher/issues/84/970131/Opinion/Story09.html
Mubutu Sese Seko: dictator of Zaire/Congo, put in to power with the help of the CIA
http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/story31.html
We have heard about lots of evil through past events that have happened in time but lets not foget the pursuer of innocents (pedophilles). These people get out and can live virtually normal lives again just by going to live in another country. Where is the justice! They are evil personified. To take a baby barely a week old and defile it in such disgusting ways. May the lord have no mercy on their souls:mad: :mad: :mad:
ozblonde
04-05-02, 03:38PM
Darn aussie I never thought of evil in that way before . But your right the evil we see and that which touches up personally is perhaps the worst of all. Do you still look at those people as "LBFM`s" (that is such a disgusting term) With out meaning to be horrible I would like to know for interests sake were you evil enough to exploit them further your self? How did your personal clash with evil change you ? You seem to have been personally touched quite deeply by your experience and the horror of seeing a baby with no future in a situation like that is something I doubt I will ever fully comprehend. Not in the same way you do I'm sure. Believe it or not just reading that has upset me as well perhaps greed is the one true evil.
No I dont look at them as LBFM`s they are just people caught in circumstances they have no control over. They do what they have to to survive and risk every form of venerial desease known just to put food on the table. I was out there exploiting them again that same night I was a guy with a pocket full of dollars in a land where every wish could come true and I was just as over sexed as the next guy. Someone had to help those poor girls feed their families.
As for how did that day change me? Well to be quite honest it didnt change me much at the time. It was just another one of those things a shrug of the shoulders a hearty Ho Ho silver and I was away. BUT that image has stuck in my head like it was just yesterday the image the smell the whole thing and living with that its impossible not to be changed in some way. Its a thing that angers me it saddens me in some ways it hurts Im really not sure how to describe the feeling apart from perhaps a cold rage towards the Marcos`s murderous rage even. I cant help but blame them for that mothers circumstance or what Im sure was that babies death. For people who are supposed to be good catholics those bastards have a lot to be judged for when they face their maker.
Pol pot has long been among my list of the most evil. Although he didnt kill the numbers that stalin did his intent was still the same.
I once worked with a guy from Cambodia who lost his family to pol pot right before his eyes. I got him drunk and stoned one night and he told me about it. His parents were to old to be productive and thus a burden on the community so the Khmer got rid of them. His brother was a teacher at a hospital. He was educated and thus one of the first to go. His sister was fat the khmer figured fat people were lazy and ate more than their share so strike one sister. His wife died of malaria there was no doctors the educated had long been wiped out. Once she was gone his two young sons were a burden pol pot had no use for orphans.
the prefered methods of execution were His brother was shot as an example to others of how much use the khmer had for the educated. His parents were old and not worth a bullet they were battered to death with pieces of wood. A rifle but to the back of the head removed his sister from an existence that was hell any way. He came back from work one night to be told the soldiers had taken his sons during the day he never seen them again.
He came to australia and took the name Max I used to call him happy chow because he never stopped smiling and would laugh at any thing at all. I never made fun of Max after that
GLADIATOR
04-09-02, 10:02AM
Well for 'evil' you do not need to look much further that 'Pol Pot.' And from pretty recent times.
Pol Pot, blamed for the slaughter of 2 million Cambodians, has left an devastating mark on Cambodia, a country which remains in a state of political unrest.
I 'guess' Amaurote, would put this guy similar to Lenin.
Amaurote
his crimes were essentially a consequence of his genuinely logical - and sincere - adherence to an extreme ideology which others had held before him, wedded to a good deal of personal insecurity.
Bull shit Amaurote. They were bloody egotistical evil murders.
---------------------------------POL POT---------------------------------------
Saloth Sar, better known as Pol Pot, was raised in a middle-class farming family in Kompong Thong province in Cambodia(at the time, a part of a French protectorate). While much of his early history is unknown, we do know that he spent a few years in a Bhuddist monastery, as well as a year learning carpentry in a Roman Catholic school before his other interests (Communism) interrupted his education.
He then spent nearly a decade as a teacher in Phnom Penh, before his communist ties were suspected, and he was forced to flee. From there, he went to full time involvement in the Cambodian Communist Party, acting as secretary.
In 1975, the Khmer Rouge overthrew the governments of Norodom Sihanouk and Lon Nol under Pol Pot's leadership. For the next four years, he was the Prime Minister of the "killing fields" Communist regime, whose philosophy of rejecting urban life in favor of a utopian agricultural society eventually resulted in this:
http://image.pathfinder.com/time/daily/polpot/images/pixbone1.jpg
Many neatly stacked piles of bones.
Conservative estimates place the quantity of human bones placed in neatly stacked piles around Cambodia at about 500,000,000, with more extreme estimates setting the bar at over 750,000,000. Most, but not all, of the people these bones formerly belonged to died as a result of execution, overwork, starvation, imprisonment, and/or torture. Total deaths/missing 2 million people.
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